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[NUKE9.13]

Ertex Design Bureau

Core thread: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=168246.0

Welcome to Ertex. As yet, the culture of Ertex is indeterminate, so there isn't much by way of fluff that I can put here.

What I can tell you is the history of the colony. A long, long time ago, your people left Earth in a fleet of interstellar transports. For years you travelled through the void of space, frozen, before arriving at the Aljadid system you now call home. As the first colonists began defrosting, arguments broke out over all manner of topics, regarding how the future colony should be run. Notably, there was also disagreement about which planet to settle. The foolish Quillians favoured a planet covered with 71% water. We Ertexites chose the far more sensible planet, covered with 67% water.
Eventually, the arguments grew so heated that the only rational choice was to leave the fools behind, and settle the planet alone. We named it after our flagship, which was quickly dismantled to construct basic colonial infrastructure. Radio contact with the Quillians revealed they had not grown any more sensible, and as our colonies grew, the gap between them widened. It has now been 95 years since we first landed on Ertex. We have planned an expedition to the planet designated 'D' on the centenary of our arrival, as our infrastructure finally approaches the point where interplanetary voyages are possible.
But... the Quillians no doubt have similar plans. Perhaps it would be wise to prepare a strong military beforehand, to intimidate our foes- to prevent war, of course.

Spoiler: Starting tech (both sides) (click to show/hide)

Ships
ITC (Interplanetary Transport Craft): The ships that carried colonists to your homeworld, now repurposed as military transports. They use rocket shuttles to ferry things to and from the surface. These shuttles have a limited capacity, meaning that with the exception of troops, the ITC cannot carry any equipment of a size greater than 1TC. It has 4TC. It uses chemical engines for propulsion. It has no armour or armaments.
Cost: 2S


Equipment
Printed Pistol: Issued to security guards before the war, the only real weapon both colonies have. They are 3D-printed out of plastic, a process which is not entirely reliable, meaning the gun has a tendency to break after prolonged use... or any use, really.
Cost: Cheap

X100 Space Suit: A civilian space suit, totally unarmoured and cumbersome to walk in. At least it works well enough, and has a self-sealing lining meaning a single shot isn't an immediate death sentence... most of the time. Necessary for deployment to worlds without breathable atmospheres.
Cost: Cheap


Other
Interplanetary Radio: Essentially just a very big radio set, capable of reliable communication between planets. Too big to fit on an ITC. Currently only useful for taunting Quillus.
Cost: 2G
Weight: 2TC

Colony Defence Grid The reason you can't instantly invade the enemy homeworld. A series of surface-to-orbit missile launchers, the only real concession to self defence the planners of the colony made. How they work is a mystery, and no one wants to risk taking them apart to find out.

Note that civilian technology is not listed here, but you can assume you have access to it, and can freely include elements that would be found in the colony's basic infrastructure- use your common sense to figure out what is available. If in doubt, feel free to ask.

Also, for a limited time, I will let you ask how difficult a hypothetical design is and why, to help calibrate your sense of difficulty.

Spoiler: Production (click to show/hide)

Ship Production Points: 16
  16 points: Unassigned.

Ground Production Points: 16
  16 points: Unassigned
 
Units: 5
  All unassigned.

Spoiler: The Map (click to show/hide)

Don't even worry about this looking nothing like a solar system. Its, uh, optimal transfers or something. Look, it's dumb, but what do you want from me?

Key:
A: A volcanic world. Constant eruptions and earthquakes result in a thoroughly unpleasant environment. 4SPP, 2GPP
B&F: Rocky worlds. (Almost) no atmosphere, no major tectonic activity, these planets are... boring. The most notable terrain features are the craters that litter the surface. 2SPP, 2GPP
C: An ocean world. Covered in 94% water, with a breathable atmosphere, and a few inhabitable islands. Prepare for lots of island-hopping. 2SPP, 4GPP
D: An earthlike world. Covered in 69% water, with a breathable atmosphere, most of the surface being inhabitable. Terrain varies wildly, from open plains to thick jungles- and of course vast seas. 5SPP, 5GPP
E: A frozen world. Almost entirely covered in ice, with an atmosphere too thin to breathe. Ice sheets make for treacherous terrain, with snow-covered mountains being not much better. 2SPP, 4GPP
G: A desert world. With a few salty 'seas' covering a mere 12% of the surface, the majority of this planet is dry as a bone. Vast sandscapes dominate, punctured by low, rocky hills, and the ocassional oasis. The atmosphere is breathable. 2SPP, 4GPP.
Ertex&Quillus: Earthlike worlds. Capturing the enemy homeworld results in victory. Yield no Production Points. I mean, they do, but those are already accounted for in your basic industry.

[NUKE9.13]

Links to start-of-turn posts.

SY95-99 not linked.
SY100
SY101

[FallacyofUrist]

I, First Engineer of Ertex, shall design... something!

Hold on.

*scribbles down design*

"Reaper" Rifle MK1:
We clearly need better weapons than plastic pistols that are basically guaranteed to break. Introducing the Reaper! The Reaper is assembled out of 3-D printed metal parts(first the parts are printed, then they are assembled into the weapon itself). The Reaper is an all-purpose combat rifle, and possesses burst and full-auto combat settings. A set of iron sights enhance accuracy. The Reaper could use more complex technology, but is instead kept simple in order to keep it cheap. The Reaper comes with a few sockets and rails and the like for as of yet undesigned attachments. Forwards compatibility!

[Khang36]

Hello, engineer khang reporting for duty!

I like the rifle design but would ut be posible to include some rails to make it posible to add attachments? I know you plan on making them modular on the revision but just incase we come up with something better to use the revision on.

[FallacyofUrist]

Seems reasonable. In it goes!

[Khang36]

"Reaper" Rifle MK1(1)khang

[Chiefwaffles]

Hi! I am here!

First: NUKE, what are the theoretical limitations of lasers in this soft scifi setting? And about where is our current energy generation/capacity tech?

Let's be a bit ambitious and design something that could work now and as a base for future designs.
Design: E-PX1 "Avenger" Laser Rifle
(Ertex - Personal Experimental 1. This name is 2 references. Can you find both of them?!?!)

The Avenger is a, well, experimental weapon based on advancements in energy generation and storage since our arrival in conjunction with laser technology that was almost near maturation before our departure. Our distant relatives on Earth were quite close to creating effective lasers.

It takes the form as a relatively large but not unwieldy rifle. It has no onboard power generation and relies on rechargeable power cells that we can either ship like regular ammunition or recharge at the local base, greatly reducing logistics costs. In the future we hope to advance on power generation, but we can't be too ambitious for now.

The weapon is best described as semi-automatic. In order to increase familiarity with our troops, reduce power waste, and to prevent overheating, the laser automatically shuts off quickly. It's in effect for a short time, but that short time should still hopefully be devastating. So it's somewhat like a slug rifle in that regard. This means our troops don't waste energy as they miss with a beam and it acting like kinetic weapons somewhat means our troops don't have to do much training for it.
The laser should be able to hopefully pierce light personal armor. We're aiming for "it works reliably" here, not "it works reliably and it does super damage!!". Because it's a laser, it should be quite accurate. Standard weaponry considerations such as ironsights (and scopes if we have those lying around) should of course be included as well.

The main advancement here is power capacity. Likely. We already know how to make lasers. Power generation is done with actual power plants (and if power generation @ forward bases/outposts/camps isn't enough, we can just treat it like regular ammo except the production process involves a lot more reactors instead of raw resource/manufacturing). We just need to hold enough power to make it useful to soldiers.

Why do this and not a regular kinetics weapon?
1.) It's cool.
2.) Versatile for many future advancements and weapons.
3.) Rechargeable cells means we don't have to ship around ammo. ((Ammo logistics is obviously abstracted to us, but this should be a passive benefit regardless))
4.) Did I mention how cool it is?

TL;DR: A laser rifle. Uses rechargeable power cells as ammo, is obviously accurate, and is simple for a rifle. Possesses a lot of future improvement potential.

1 - "Reaper" Rifle MK1: khang
1 - E-PX1 "Avenger" Laser Rifle: Chiefwaffles

[FallacyofUrist]

2 - "Reaper" Rifle MK1: khang, FallacyofUrist
1 - E-PX1 "Avenger" Laser Rifle: Chiefwaffles

This.

[Khang36]

Hmm.... on one hand ballistic rifles are practical designs on the other having laser rifles opens up ship based laser abd other direct energy goodies.... practicality or lasers...

[Chiefwaffles]

Here's the second design of Amaok in Planetary Arms Race, the ABR-1:

ABR-1: A simple, semi-automatic rifle designed to punch through kevlar and spacesuits with ease. While not too effective in close quarters, it offers greater combat ability in wide, open areas.

It's practically the same thing as the Reaper, minus a few frills. They both serve as the "relatively bland short-term staple design" with the misguided (at least, according to me) intent of making our forces "competent" before we do anything ambitious.

While the Reaper would probably be, in the short term, the best idea, it doesn't have any future potential. It's effectively a wasted design in the long term. Let's say we get a really competent rifle that does everything it set out to do. Can we progress from this? This isn't Sensei's Arm Races, where the level of technology is low enough that notable improvements in guns can be made. Generally the progression route in regards to kinetics in sci-fi is magnetic weapons - something that this doesn't really give us experience for anything. The Reaper would be useful now and would, again, make our forces "competent", but where's the value in that? Ultimately it'd be fairly quickly outgrown by better tech that doesn't benefit from having it.

I mostly just want something that's not the "relatively bland short-term staple design". The Avenger can serve as a proper infantry weapon while giving us routes to many future options. Worst case scenario, we spend a revision or lose ground for one turn. (Worster case is that NUKE thinks lasers should be hard to get, but I doubt that and we'll hopefully see before the design is finalized).

[Khang36]

Sure lets go for laser rifles

1 - "Reaper" Rifle MK1: FallacyofUrist
2 - E-PX1 "Avenger" Laser Rifle: Chiefwaffles, khang

[piratejoe]

May as well do this and join, along with give my two cents. Since I feel like Lasers are overdone, and we may as well be over ambitious like Nafuna and get away with it more interesting, how about we go for gauss rifles?

[Khang36]

May as well do this and join, along with give my two cents. Since I feel like Lasers are overdone, and we may as well be over ambitious like Nafuna and get away with it more interesting, how about we go for gauss rifles?

I wouldn't mind having a gause rifle either. Also for ships ahould we look into making fussion reactors it would give us the power needed for ship grade laser or gauss if we end up going that direction.

[FallacyofUrist]

Alright, you want ambition?

"Big Dakka" Heavy Machine Gun MK 1:
In response to a fellow designer's insistence that we need to shoot higher in order to be effective in the long run, I have created a more difficult but more effective assault weapon. Introducing the Big Dakka! The Big Dakka is a magnetism based machine gun. It uses electromagnets to propel metal slugs at great speeds and rapid rates. A lack of recoil from conventional slug-based weapons greatly improves accuracy. A belt-based system feeds ammunition into the machine gun, and the magnets are slow to build up heat, allowing for vast spans of continuous fire. While we could have simply used metal slugs for the Big Dakka, I elected to add an improvement to the ammunition used. A little explosive compound in the tip of each slug leads to explosive ammunition, devastating against basically everything.

The main focus here is getting the magnetic launch systems to work. Gauss weaponry, which we will start developing with the Big Dakka, will lead to efficiency(only power is needed for propulsion) and death!

The only thing more ambitious than this would be Catgirl Assassins.

"Catgirl Assassins" Experimental Biology Modification Program:
The amazing possibilities biology modification has are clear to us all. Longer lifespans. Super soldiers. Enhanced intelligence. I would suggest we go into this field immediately, starting with genetic splicing. DNA, after all, is the building code of all life we know of...

So introducing Catgirl Assassins! By splicing feline DNA into a person's genome, we can produce soldiers with enhanced reflexes and dexterity and superhuman senses, not to mention the improvised weapons(claws)! There are some quirks in the process, but that's why we're working on this, to iron the quirks out.

Our new super soldiers will be trained in stealth techniques, something that should prove natural to them due to their feline DNA. Once equipped with appropriate weapons, we will have an amazing assassin force.

1 - "Big Dakka" Heavy Machine Gun MK1: FallacyofUrist
0 - "Reaper" Rifle MK1: FallacyofUrist
2 - E-PX1 "Avenger" Laser Rifle: Chiefwaffles, khang
0 - "Catgirl Assassins" Experimental Biology Modification Program:

[Chiefwaffles]

I know lasers can be seen as unoriginal, but even with that, it feels like Gauss Rifles are a bit... overdone?
I guess because Gauss Rifles are basically just "Gun Mk.2" whereas lasers are LASERS. Lasers are a complete paradigm shift! We get to move to beams and just using power as ammo instead of tons of power and bullets! We get to be cool! Imagine! Streaks of light going across the battlefield as our shielded soldiers advance against the primitive bullet-using opponent.

Also lasers are better at being point defense if that ever comes up.